One of my roommates in undergrad was from China, and whenever he went back to China to visit his family, we literally couldn’t contact him because all the messaging apps/services we use are blocked in China.
Another family friend of mine lived and taught in Macau as a professor for a while, and he explained how he had to get a VPN just to access the regular internet.
Any government that locks down access like that is not one worthy of admiration. It’s insane that people defend the CCP.
You have to understand that there are a lot of people that genuinely like the CCP because under them, there are a lot of people that went from the likes of farmers and factory workers to a serious middle class, with all the improvements to the quality of life that entails. You'd be surprised what people are willing to forgive in exchange for this.
The CCP monitoring program also extends far beyond the country borders as well, and while they would not dare do an extraordinary rendition for pissing off the CCP, many expats still have family within Chinese borders that are completely fair game for the CCP to do as they please with. So many expats won't risk it. The CCP are already known for fucking with families just because some of its members have expatriated. And they don't have a limit to how far they'll go. Concentration camps are nothing new there.
It’s very first-world of you that access to garbage like Reddit or Twitter is apparently more important than the single greatest reduction of poverty in human history—and even more typical that you are either ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the hundred years of precedent that says China is utterly correct in believing the West would abuse the lowering of the Great Firewall to try and foment reactionary revolt.
Its quite insane actually. I was the second child my mother gave birth to during the one child policy. They would’ve tried to force her to get an abortion if they knew. But she hid the pregnancy until she gave birth to me. They couldn’t justify killing a child that has already been born, so I lived, but they still made my parents pay tens of thousands of RMB (¥) to get legal documents like birth certificates.
My mother still have pro-ccp views. Like wtf. But everytime she start spewing shit like that, I’ll just tell her “If you support the communist party, do you agree that I shouldn’t have been born?” That usually shut her up.
Also, this community has one of those “Marxist-Leninist” as a moderator so I’ll make an archive of this.
The thing I love most about democracy is that I get zero choice or control over who represents me in government at all and I let them make decisions for me that hurt me. In fact I celebrate it when they make decisions that hurt me
…so these Hexbear folx have got a chip on their shoulder, huh?
From scanning through their comments, I’m guessing they don’t actually believe the shit they’re saying? Only because, if they did, I would think they would actually try to have a discussion with people instead of whatever firestorm is happening on this thread. I’m not up to date - is this a troll instance?
Lemmy.ml get mad at people who don’t like the Democracy Party. We must all support Prime Minister Biden Robinette or else the Party of the Republic will win the next Voting.
I lost a parent to antvaxx stuff. A drop of her blood is on the hands on of every free speech absolutist who pushes that garbage and creates space for the worst people possible.
So, instead of rehashing the same old talking points for the upteenth time, would anyone be interested in discussing China’s political project in a broader and more mature way? Like for example:
Who do you think should’ve come to power following the fall of the Qing, through to the civil war (if not the CPC)?
Do you agree with the direction of Deng’s economic reforms and opening up to foreign investment? If not, should he have stayed closer to Mao’s policies, or should he have gone further towards liberalization, or something else?
What aspects or projects of the CPC have been good or successful?
What aspects or projects of the CPC have been flawed or unsuccessful?
What lessons can be learned from the successes and failures of the CPC?
Ngl I don’t have high hopes for this comment but I’m tryin’ over here.
I agree, though I think it may have gone too far. Allowing billionaires is a dangerous gambit due to the possibility of them gaining political influence, and allowing landlords was a mistake. However, these reforms have helped lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty and were necessary at the time.
Land reform, the Barefoot Doctors program, Deng’s reforms, and the Belt and Road initiative have all been very successful and increased the standards of living for an enormous number of people. The CPC has had a focus on improving the lives of their poorest people, and in that regard they’ve done a very good job.
The Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, LGBT rights, and past China’s foreign policy such as supporting Pol Pot/the Khemer Rouge and invading Vietnam. A lot of the blame for the Sino-Soviet split lies with Khrushchev, but I think there’s enough blame to go around. I think the Soviet policy of “peaceful co-existence” was more correct, and more in line with what China ended up doing anyway (libs will roast me for that, I’m sure). Some positive things did happen during the Cultural Revolution (such as the above-mentioned Barefoot Doctors program), but generally it was a chaotic mess and I’m not sure it accomplished very much. The GLF had a lot of factors, including the Sino-Soviet split, but there’s plenty of blame to ascribe to Mao (the sparrows did not, in fact, deserve it)
Kind of trite but one take-away is “seek truth from facts.” When Mao was successful, it was because of his experience living among rural Chinese, and looking at what they needed. Where he was unsuccessful was when he got too caught up in theory, sometimes assuming something would work without paying close enough attention to whether it actually was. I consider the overall political project successful due to the improvements made in people’s lives, but how the devil’s bargain with the capitalists will ultimately play out remains to be seen.
i am once again relieved that cracker libs are too lazy and ignorant to investigate anything beyond the ccp bad that msm tells them, and that chinese libs hate themselves too much to think themselves worthy of educating their cracker lib betters about cpc atrocity conspiracy theories.
though tbf at least shit like tiananmen is falsifiable, i think i’d have an aneurysm if white people on the internet started telling me that mao never left his palanquin and ate the PLA’s entire stock of chicken over the course of the long march. like big spoon stalin but in earnest mao-wtf
Yeah it’s like, typing this out really drew my attention to how much conversations about China are dominated by random noise that’s largely insignificant or bullshit. It’s always this 24 hour news coverage level of analysis, with no actual study of history or major trends and themes. Hell I realized myself the other day that there were two leaders between Deng and Xi who I couldn’t name and know basically nothing about.
I think that most people fall into certain ideological traps that allow them to simplify narratives to the point of never really feeling the need to study anything, in part because the world is just so big that it’s hard to actually be informed about things. You never have to decide how you feel about specific events in China’s history if you just scream “CHINA BAD” every time it comes up, and that’s a whole lot of history you never have to bother learning now.
Hell I realized myself the other day that there were two leaders between Deng and Xi who I couldn’t name and know basically nothing about.
Oh well that’s easy, before Xi Jinping there was Hu Jintao, who was a kind of moderate technocratic kind of guy. Always about plans and numbers. And before Jintao there was a magic toad wizard who wore George Romero glasses and would yell at journalists when they asked him stupid shit FrogPog
Omg that’s like straight out of a movie. I’ve seen that “too young, too simple, sometimes naive” quote before but I had no idea that’s where it’s from. I love it.
I have a friend from China who’s a lib and he’s probably one of the most racist people I know (specifically against Chinese people). Just the other day he said Chinese people have never invented anything and that good inventions can only come from the US or Europe. He also wants to look, sound, and dress like an Ivy-league country club dude. Dude regularly reminds me of a Chinese Uncle Ruckus. Is that kind of self-hating common or is it mostly because he’s from a rich family?
it’s an interesting exercise to map racism and self hatred against class interests, particularly in the context of america and china’s antagonistic relationship. mao’s perenially applicable class analysis has changed somewhat over the years, but the gist remains the same: the big bourgeois landlords/compradors have morphed into corrupt officials and bureaucratic monopolists, the middle bourgeois are now real estate/insurance/finance goons or factory owners and right wing petty bourgeois have added techbros to their ranks.
in my experience, the big bourgeois are largely past this level of ingroup status signalling, they’re too busy hustling their stolen capital out of china and race for them only matters insofar as who lets them stash their cash where. meanwhile, the middle bourgeois and the upper rungs of the petty bourgeois are likely most prone to this sort of behavior. they don’t have enough cash or clout to feel like they’re above the party, but they have a big enough amount of ill gotten goods/chips on their shoulder to make them feel like they might be arbitrarily targeted (or maybe they feel like they deserve more but for the intervention of the party), and so they channel that resentment into hating other chinese people.
less rich people also ape western affectations for a wider variety of reasons, but i will say that western media penetration into china is very deep and pervasive and that the 90s/chimerica years resulted in at least a generation of thought leaders and public intellectuals that are extremely ideologically compromised and it is unclear how fast their influence might be dissipated, if ever.
I wonder what happened to MLK and all the people who started the BLM protests in America which guarantees freedom of protest and speech. It really sucks that they all were either murdered or committed suicide and the police were never able to do anything about it.
Oh well, gotta let go and let god. Btw, did you hear that the evil Chinese Government sent someone who threw a firebomb to jail? Nasty stuff, glad I live somewhere civilized.
Is this trying to say people who support the most successful AES state and largest democracy in the world are not real marxists, but people who just believe western propoganda with rascist characteristics are the true marxists?
They do actually allow protests. Western media was having a fucking field day earlier this year talking about how China had bowed to pressure from protests regarding their covid policy.
You mean the revolt that happened after people burned to death in their own homes when the state locked them in? The revolt that state censors still tried to remove from the internet? The one police cracked down on?
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
they also repealed the hong kong extradition law in response to those protests. Although admittedly once they fulfilled the demands of the protest and the protest continued they then cracked down more
“the exception that proves the rule” doesn’t just mean any evidence against your point is actually evidence for your point. it means that something is only notable because it’s usually rare.
Did you know that Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China during the Tiananmen Square protests, resigned from all official positions shortly after the protests? I don’t recall Nixon doing anything similar over Kent State, however.
The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Not the same event. It’s rather like if someone was talking about the migration in response to the Homestead Act and you mention the Donner party as though it was part of that.
I am pretty sure they mean the revolts from right at the start of the PRC. Wikipedia is a hostile source and I don’t endorse it, but it explains well enough that the Land Reform Movement started before the end of the Civil War and mostly ended by 1953. Because the CPC/PLA only had so much manpower and China is huge, they had very little direct involvement, and instead just said in so many words “we aren’t protecting the landlords’ claim to their property, do what you will”. The peasants then independently seized the land, usually either killing or driving out the landlord, and distributed it among themselves or sometimes held it in common.
Not related to what you are responding to but just as an interesting symbolic link between the two things you mentioned, iirc the first people killed, butchered and eaten by the Donner party were their native scouts, afterwards mostly erased from the story in popular telling. Just as the homesteaders first ethnically cleansed the native Americans before hunger for more land turned them cannibalistically against each other
That is interesting! I didn’t know they had native guides, though I suppose of course they would and of course those guides were the first sacrificed by colonizers.
Looked a little more into it, they weren’t actually the very first eaten but were the first (and by some accounts only) to be murdered for the purpose of eating. They both refused to eat human meat before fleeing (they’d been warned their murder was being planned), but were caught up with down the trail a few days later. Shortly after they were butchered the group (a segment of the party that had been sent ahead) that did it were harboured and fed in a Miwok village (the guides having also been Miwok I think). A grizzly tale.
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